Steadily and consistently increasing our net worth often has me concerned that I’m missing something, doing something wrong or doing it too slowly so it is time I set myself (and my family) a new short term goal.
All in Saving
Steadily and consistently increasing our net worth often has me concerned that I’m missing something, doing something wrong or doing it too slowly so it is time I set myself (and my family) a new short term goal.
One questions I ask is “if you were given $10,000 right now what would you do”? I picked that amount because in my mind it is enough to be significant, $1,000 just doesn’t make people sit up and listen, but the thought of a sudden and unexpected $10,000 does.
All your working life you are trying to increase your net worth so that when you finally stop working you start to slowly spend it to live on. If upon retirement each year you take 4% out of your pot of savings it will take about 30 years to boil the pot dry. So what can you live on a year? Do you need to invest $100K, $200 or $500K?
Is it just me or are people confusing saving for a house with saving for retirement? I keep hearing about first home buyers all the time and how difficult it is to get into the market. But the question I keep asking myself is “why do people use their KiwiSaver as their primary mode of saving for a deposit?”
Back in July 2016 I helped Mr Happy Saver hook up with some SmartShares. He only bought a very small amount because it was always my intention to use it as an experiment to blog about. Today is sale day!
Having a common goal helps. We equally don’t want to be broke now or broke in retirement. We want to work less now, enjoy family life now, be prepared when things go wrong and not be so reliant on other people to create an income. These goals keep us on the straight and narrow and they are something that we openly discuss.
There is the general feeling that kids don’t learn about money at school, right? But, that is not the end of the world because we understand that as their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends we have the knowledge to teach them, yes?
Every day I am thinking about how hard our money is working for us. The harder it works, the more it makes and the less WE have to work. There is absolutely no point in me putting money in places where it does not earn any interest.
A Bond is a loan you make to a government, state owned enterprise, council or company. Perhaps they have a specific project they are working on and they need to raise some cash to do it.